Subject: Informa Analyst Viewpoint on launch of Apple’s iCloud
Comment from Giles Cottle, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media on the launch of Apple’s iCloud service at WWDC.
Apple was not first to launch a cloud-based storage and content service: a host of start-ups, not to mention Amazon and Google, have made similar plays. Lest we forget, though, that there were several inferior suitors to the MP3 player crown before Apple blew the competition out of the water with the iPod. First does not necessarily equal best.
Will it trump the early cloud adopters here? Many of the features shown by Jobs and co today are not new. Google offers calendar sharing and syncing, Amazon provides music streaming to any device, and a plethora of companies offer document sharing to multiple devices (including those on iOS). iCloud, though, brings several new features to the table. The ability to easily watch video content on any device is something the world’s operators and CE manufacturers have been trying to master for years, and Apple appears to have beaten them to it.
Yet it’s the fact that iCloud brings all of these compelling features together in a compelling, easy-to-use and intuitive manner – rather than the features themselves – that makes the iCloud proposition. The basic user proposition of cloud services – being able to access your photos, documents, video and music everywhere – is fairly straightforward. But it was always going to take someone like Apple to really educate mass market consumers about the value of cloud-baesd services. We are, it appears, on the cusp of that moment.
Most crucially, Apple’s tight control of its device ecosystem means that iCloud is much more likely to, as Steve Jobs puts it, “just work”. Apple’s total control of the device and content ecosystem has been heavily criticised in the past, but, if iCloud works as well in practice as it did in today’s demo, it’s a stunning validation of the power of closed ecosystems.
Giles’ bio is available from our website:
http://blogs.informatandm.com/authors/giles-cottle/
